HardDrives ATA 100 or 133 1

[Doozer1]

Hello,

I need to purchase a new harddrive into a system a couple of years old (P4 - 1500mhz), but I have noticed harddrives come in different specifications i.e ATA-100 or ATA-133. So my question is does the IDE port on my mother board have to match ATA-100, ATA-133 depending on what it supports or do IDE ports on a mother boards support either ATA-100, ATA-133?

Thanks for any replies

 

[edfair]

Speed of the M/B parts is fixed and supports whatever the chips had designed in at the time of build. Newer hard drives at higher speeds are backwards compatible and set themselves to the lower speed.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[micker377]

Anything above ATA 60 will work. Be sure to use an 80 wire IDE cable. Clue is the IDE port on the mobo is usually colored blue.

 

[cdogg]

Your system likely only supports up to ATA/100. So it doesn't matter which drive you decide to buy, it should work. If you went with an ATA/133 drive, for example, it would run at ATA/100 automatically going with the fastest spec that your board supports.

Now you could get an add-in PCI IDE card that supports ATA/133 if you really wanted to, but there is no real advantage to ATA/133 unless you plan on setting up a RAID array.

~cdogg
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